The ‘sweet spot’ for Wi-Fi, or any wireless service is the crafting of a service that people will pay to use, an effective business model with perceived value. It’s tough for the commercial guys who rightly want a fair fee for the service. However, the problem is perfectly understandable--entire cities and city areas (hot zones) offer Wi-Fi access for free. Many businesses offer the connection for ‘free’ as well--if you forget that you are buying their services and products while enjoying the access.

Allyn Hall, In-Stat analyst, put it this way, "Both cellular and Wi-Fi are currently serving mobile data users. However, so far, neither service has found the sweet spot, the perfect balance of speed, coverage and price."

However, the ‘sweet spot’ is a relative concept, and not just relative to speed, coverage and price. It is relative to the service providers’ and the customers’ settings. ‘Free’ may actually be a good price for providers in certain settings while very costly may be a good price for users in other settings.

For many hotels, restaurants and other businesses, Wi-Fi is being offered to patrons for ‘free’ as a side benefit, a perk, a value-add, a reason to stay longer, a reason not to leave, a reason to get another cup of cappuccino, etc. It attracts. In this type of setting, the business model is often based on indirect revenues--increased business revenue because the people come more often, stay longer and spend more.

Another sweet-spot business model is Wi-Fi access for high-density housing areas. Strategically placed access points can offer connectivity for large enough numbers of people to make the venture worthwhile, at prices that undercut cable and DSL. In this setting, the customer is happy with ‘adequate’ service at a lower price than otherwise would have to be paid.

Airports and convention centers are settings for high-revenue sweet spots where visitors, mostly business travelers, are willing to pay a premium for the service. In these settings, the business traveler is delighted to have the access at nearly any price (goes on the expense report).

Hospitals and commercial buildings are additional settings in which sweet spots can be created for hotspots.

On a larger countywide/statewide/nationwide scale, finding the Wi-Fi sweet spot is much more difficult for major carriers/service providers. For them, Wi-Fi is the end-of-network customer connection that must be supported with a robust wide-area backbone network, not to mention maintenance. The number of Wi-Fi access points needed to make a commercial system viable is staggering. In addition, many of these commercial hotspots would most likely compete with free zones.

For large commercial entities, mobile WiMAX is more viable, patterned after the cell phone infrastructure and offering ubiquity through mega-cell coverage instead of thousands of mini Wi-Fi cells. Careful crafting of scaled sweet spots based on user profiles for wide-area mobile WiMAX may actually make it tougher to find sweet spots for Wi-Fi hot spots.

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